What’s on
The French Institute of Rabat invites you to discover the exhibition "Sacred Innovation" by Youssef Elmekaoui, taking place from October 15 to November 14 at the French Institute of Rabat Gallery. Since 2011, Youssef Elmekaoui has explored a poetics of the sacred through materials sourced from the places of worship of his childhood – sugar, salt, wax, wool, and alum stone. Perceived as white, these elements carry a symbolic depth, condensing memories, beliefs, and identities. White is never absence here, but an active force, a dense silence where collective narratives unfold.
Released from representation, painting becomes gesture and ritual. The forms – often fragmented or unfinished – evoke the transient and the in-between, while repetition transforms into variation and difference, in the Deleuzian spirit.
Elmekaoui's practice interrogates origins in a world marked by displacement. "Returning to the sources" is no longer nostalgic, but a process where identity shifts and reinvents itself. A graduate of the National Institute of Fine Arts of Tetouan and a professor of Applied Arts in Rabat, he continues this quest using copper and lead, revealing the spiritual density of a world in constant transformation.
Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday from 10:00 to 18:00, Saturday from 10:00 to 17:00.
